When there’s a stage full of candidates from a party with a tenuous connection to reality, there’s bound to be soooo many ‘misstatements’ to chose from. I’ve winnowed it down to what I thought were the two biggest: Carly Fiorina’s Planned Parenthood utterances and The Donald’s validation of an anti-vaxxer talking point…

I originally thought about doing a running fact check on Wednesday’s CNN debate featuring their top 10 (plus 1) Republican candidates. But with two hours and forty-five minutes to digest, I realized it would be a fool’s errand. Then it occurred to me that the act of watching CNN for anything longer than a minute or two was, in itself, a fool’s errand. Especially on a day when the weather was actually nice.

So I resolved to get up extra early to do my due diligence on the debate. This wrap-up took a while to write because I felt like I needed a shower afterwards. And I just skipped the Junior Varsity debate. I hear Trump won that one, too, despite not being on the stage.

Journey for Justice

I went downtown for something unlikely to get much love from CNN, something with a bit more moral substance– the NAACP’s Journey for Justice San Diego March and Rally. This event was in solidarity with the final stop of America’s Journey for Justice, a thousand mile march through five states in starting August 1st in Selma, Alabama and concluding yesterday in Washington DC.

At various stops along the way they held town meetings and rallies discussing economic inequality, education, the criminal justice system, voting rights, and youth.

Among the speakers were San Diego City Councilman Todd Gloria, Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, San Diego Unified School Board President Marne Foster, San Diego NAACP President Dr. Andre J. Branch, and Dr. Willie Brown, chair of the San Diego chapter of the Black American Political Association of California.

Branch said “it should be obvious that all lives matter,” but he said complaints to the NAACP on issues such as job discrimination indicate otherwise, along with education statistics showing that schools with the highest percentage of African-American and Latino students have the most inexperienced teachers.

Local Republicans Favor Trump, Carson

Locally, the Republicans invited the party faithful to watch the debate at a Kearny Mesa Chinese restaurant. A video posted at the Times of San Diego includes fleeting images of people trying to hide their faces from the camera.

San Diego Republican GOP Chairman Tony Krvaric announced the top five finishers in the poll taken at the party-sponsored event: Trump, Ben Carson, Fiorina, Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Ted Cruz. No percentage breakdown was given, but an overheard ballot-by-ballot tally indicated the vast majority of votes went to the top three.

Before the debate, North County Supervisor Bill Horn said: “I’m just here to see who I’m going to vote for.”

Who might prevail? he was asked.

“Given the fact that Trump doesn’t need any money and really is politically incorrect — I’m close to that side,” Horn began. “But I like Ben Carson. I think he is extremely intelligent.”

San Diego Democrats held viewing party at a Jimmy Carter’s Mexican restaurant on Banker’s Hill. I believe their poll ended with None-of-the-Above winning the top spot.

Fiorina’s Dead Baby Delusion

Former HP executive Carly Fiorina laid out a big fat lie, one conveniently ignored by many of the ‘fact checkers’ dispatched to the CNN debate. Here’s what she said:

As regards Planned Parenthood, anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, it’s heart beating, it’s legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.

Sarah Kliff, who has watched all of the available footage from which the “Center for Medical Progress” edited its Planned Parenthood attack videos, writes that:

…there is no moment where Planned Parenthood discusses procuring fetal tissue for profit, nor is there the scene that Fiorina describes. […] the things Fiorina describes — the legs kicking, the intact “fully formed fetus,” the heart beating, the remarks about having to “harvest its brain” — are pure fiction.

After Fiorina went on Good Morning America Thursday morning and insisted her description was accurate, Kliff went looking for other possible sources of the footage Fiorina claimed to describe. The most likely possibility is another video from the same anti-Planned Parenthood group…

The third Human Capitol video has stock footage of a fetus kicking on a table — though that footage isn’t from inside a Planned Parenthood. It also has an interview with Holly O’Donnell, the former technician, who claims to have seen a fetus with a beating heart. O’Donnell says that, in her former job, she was once instructed to procure the brain tissue from the remains of an aborted fetus.

Dr. Donald Renders a Medical Opinion

When the anti-vaxxer crowd tries to sound reasonable, their ploys include the too-many-vaccines-at-once and we-need-to-spread-these-shots-out approaches.

The Donald wasted no time pandering to those folks when asked about vaccines:

I am totally in favor of vaccines. But I want smaller doses over a longer period of time. Because you take a baby in — and I’ve seen it — and I’ve seen it, and I had my children taken care of over a long period of time, over a two or three year period of time.

Same exact amount, but you take this little beautiful baby, and you pump — I mean, it looks just like it’s meant for a horse, not for a child, and we’ve had so many instances, people that work for me.

Just the other day, two years old, two and a half years old, a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back, and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.

Dr. Ben Carson jumped in to say:

“We have extremely well-documented proof that there’s no autism associated with vaccinations.”

It’s too bad he didn’t stop there, as Tara Haelle at Forbes says in her article dissecting this part of the debate:

“But it is true that we are probably giving way too many in too short a period of time, and a lot of pediatricians now recognize that and, I think, are cutting down on the number and the proximity in which those are done.”

Wrong, wrong and stupidly wrong. And the “Dr.” Rand Paul jumped in with:

“I’m all for vaccines, but I’m also for freedom”

Overwhelmed yet? Okay, Here’s a gif of The Donald, courtesy of CNN.

And the Winner Was… Bernie Sanders?!

Hey, I’m not the one who said it.

The Huffington Post reporting on Sander’s “live tweeting” the debate is worth a read.

Rich get richer. Everyone else gets poorer. And all these guys can talk about is war and defunding Planned Parenthood. #DebateWithBernie

The story about Sanders “winning” the debate (on social media) came from The Hill, which only gives the Vermont Senator ink because they openly loathe Hillary Clinton:

Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was crowned king of the debate yet again after producing the single biggest Facebook post of the night by far.

“It wasn’t even close,” says Brandon Silverman, CEO of CrowdTangle, a company that measures and analyzes social media interactions.

“The evening was really pretty sad,” Sanders wrote in the Facebook post that garnered over 176,000 likes and 35,000 shares. “This country and our planet face enormous problems. And the Republican candidates barely touched upon them tonight. And when they did, they were dead wrong on virtually every position they took. The Republican Party cannot be allowed to lead this country. That’s why we need a political revolution.”

Clearly, the improving economy and falling unemployment have yet to adequately lift the living standards of middle- and low-incomes. The census data show that almost 3 million more people were working year-round in 2014 than in 2013, yet real median earnings were unchanged for both men and women. Poverty remains higher and median incomes lower than before the recession, and this pattern — taking longer in the upturn to make up the losses from the downturn — seems dangerously embedded in the economy.

Credit: CPI

The Center on Policy Initiatives has been hard at work crunching the local data and will be releasing a detailed report next week. Here’s what they had to say as of this morning:

“Of those living below the Federal poverty line, 41.5% are working,” said CPI Research Director, Peter Brownell, PhD. “For those 67,115 San Diegans, escaping poverty is not a matter of finding employment, it is a matter of transforming our low-paying jobs into jobs that pay enough to live on.”

Recognizing that the official poverty line is far below the cost of living in areas like San Diego, the Census Bureau also provides data on double the federal poverty level. One-third of San Diego’s population – 438,277 people – live in that near-poverty level of economic hardship. That includes more than 40% of all children.

Among the 10 industries with the most San Diego employees, earnings continue to be lowest in the hotel and restaurant industry, with median earnings of $26,271 for full-time workers. That is less than it costs a single adult to meet basic expenses in San Diego, and much less than it takes to support a family.

“The San Diego region added more than 40,000 jobs in the past year, but too many of those jobs are paying poverty wages,” said Kyra Greene, PhD, CPI research and policy analyst. “The recovery has not reached hundreds of thousands of people in our community.”

On This Day: 1868 – At a New York convention of the National Labor Congress, Susan B. Anthony calls for the formation of a Working Women’s Association. As a delegate to the Congress, she persuaded the committee on female labor to call for votes for women and equal pay for equal work. But male delegates deleted the reference to the vote. 1955 – Capitol Records released “Magic Melody, Part Two”. The song consisted only of the last two notes of the musical phrase, “Shave and a haircut, two bits.” It was the shortest song to ever to be released. 2011– The Occupy Wall Street movement launched with an anti-Wall Street march and demonstration that ended up as a 2-month encampment in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. The event led to protests and movements around the world, with their focus on economic inequality, corruption, greed and the influence on government of moneyed interests. Their slogan: “We are the 99%.”

I read the Daily Fishwrap(s) so you don’t have to… Catch “the Starting Line” Monday thru Friday right here at San Diego Free Press (dot) org. Send your hate mail and ideas to DougPorter@SanDiegoFreePress.Org Check us out on Facebook and Twitter.

Doug Porter

Doug Porter was active in the early days of the alternative press in San Diego, contributing to the OB Liberator, the print version of the OB Rag, the San Diego Door, and the San Diego Street Journal. He went on to have a 35-year career in the Hospitality business and decided to go back into raising hell when he retired. He won numerous awards for his columns from the Society of Professional Journalists in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. Doug is a cancer survivor (sans vocal chords) and lives in North Park.